GNOME mailing lists have a central server as well, so I don't understand the point. It's not like you could send emails to any random server and have them appear in a list.

In any case, mailing lists are terrible for moderation, onboarding, and spam—just like anything that is based on email. Email is a centralised game, these days, unless you want everything to be marked as spam, and have nobody receive anything.

In any case: you can interact with Discourse via email as well.

@ebassi I’ve found Discourse’s onboarding features smart—messages essentially getting you to learn the etiquette, to better understand where the other person is talking from (whether they’re a newcomer or not), and so on. It probably helps lower the barrier to entry and make interactions smoother.

(I find it intriguing though that we need such “social prostheses” in the first place; is the on-line etiquette too different from real-life interactions?)

@abcdw @khinsen No, you can't do that. You need to have an account on the Discourse instance.

Depending on the configuration of the instance, you may also need to actually browse it and interact with it a bit to raise your user level, before you can open topics just by sending an email.

@abcdw @khinsen That's not our experience. Though, of course, if you start contributing a lot to GNOME, you can ask to get an LDAP account, and then you get single-sign-on for all GNOME services.

If you're referring to being able to send patches via email, that's just false economy: you have a steep set up cost (git send-email is not a simple thing), and then you get stuck with patches over email, which is a fate worse than death.